The incredible shrinking podcast industry?
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Certainly this discrepancy has to have been known about for some time. I speculate that the ad industry had some influence on this decision to bring listener metrics more in line with reality.
And what's the large scale behavioural change? People weren't listening to all the podcasts that the app had been downloading, and they still aren't?
1. The Apple Podcast app has been updated to longer automatically download episodes of a show if the listener has stopped listening to the show.
2. This has resulted in the "download count" metric crashing for several high profile podcasts the publish frequently -- The Daily from NYTimes is mentioned.
3. This lowers advertising rates and is basically bad for the publishers of those podcasts -- the "download count" for some shows has fallen by 40%.
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Now to me this seems like an obviously good move because podcast episodes can be long and can eat up a lot of space on a device -- especially if they are never played, meaning that they never have the "delete after being played" opportunity.
Also, advertisers obviously care about how many people hear their advertisements, not how many people download the podcast episode, so the fact that advertisers even have to consider the "download count" metric at all means they are operating with inferior information.
Even when I do play a podcast that I have downloaded, I often skip the advertisements because it is so easy to hit the fast-forward-30-seconds button a few times.
But I have been assuming that podcast apps collect information about whether or not a podcast episode is ever played, and also on what parts of the episode the user rewinds or skips, and so forth.
For instance, it would be valuable information to know that of the listeners who actually download and start playing and listening to a certain 2-hour-long podcast episode, 99.4% quit listening within the first ten minutes.
Why would you assume this?
(Most) podcasts are RSS feeds. You can use any app to listen to them. You can even write your own app to listen to them.
Why would you intentionally pick an RSS reader that told some rando everything you listened to?
1. It comes preinstalled and is the default podcasts app
2. It works pretty well
3. People don’t care
4. The “told some rando” is basically the default with mass-market technology
5. That’s kind of how web ads work
I suppose I should turn them off but I'm always thinking I might listen
There isn't enough happening to fit 7 hours of news every week.
The best thing is that ad segments are _always_ multiples of 30 seconds, so it's really easy to skip them :D
Overcast even has a "skip intro" option for podcasts that have a regular ad of the same length in the beginning every time.
>3. This lowers advertising rates and is basically bad for the publishers of those podcasts -- the "download count" for some shows has fallen by 40%.
As I understand it, when YouTube about a decade ago started using more accurate metrics, it turned out that the viewership for some very prominent corporate channels was way overinflated. This is why The Onion, CollegeHumor, and Funny or Die all suddenly vanished. (And probably also why QCode has become way, way less active on producing new podcasts, or delivering on its goal of turning podcasts that hit it big into film/TV projects.)
I was under the impression that these two died due to Facebook. Facebook massively inflated video views (a video playing for 3 seconds without sound as it scrolled past in your feed counted as a view), these companies believed the bigger numbers on Facebook, so they heavily pivoted into Facebook videos over YouTube, with no monetization strategy, completely cratering in the process.
This is corroborated by someone who worked at CollegeHumor.
Honestly, at this rate, I'm surprised google hasn't killed gmail.
https://www.theverge.com/23891397/google-podcasts-youtube-sp...
From the outside looking in, it feels like Google lets their org structure dictate their product strategy to a comical degree.
Also we already have an example of podcasting functionality being integrated into a music app: spotify. And IMO it is a complete failure, the interface is constantly fighting between podcasts and music. Two methods of consuming media that are different, making the entire experience subpar.
So I do think moves like this still fit into some category of “killed by Google” lists.
It would surprise me a lot if the switch to the internet as a medium changed the fundamentals much here. It’s probably easier to discover new podcasts than it was to find new talk radio shows, but does that really move the needle enough to justify the VC funding in this space?
-production costs have dropped so much so there are more options from more content
-broadcast costs have dropped so you can have 4 hour podcasts for basically the same cost as 1 hour
-audience is global instead of local, so way more listeners
-asynchronous nature makes it easier to fit into your schedule. I can’t listen to my favorite talk radio show because I’m working. But I can listen to my favorite podcast whenever.
So this should mean that there’s more people, and more money. So investment makes sense.
Long form audio content isn’t a niche market all up. I do think it is a market that lends itself to a high degree of fragmentation because of low production and distribution cost, which makes it hard to monetize.
I listen to niche podcasts from all over the world in a variety of topics spaces that would never have mass appeal required for radio or television but a global asynchronous audience is enough.
I prefer audiobooks. At least audiobooks tend to have a beginning, middle and an end (and an editor!) so the content is a little more well planned vs just rando jabronis bloviating which sometimes happens in podcasts.
There are podcasts that are actually edited, those are the good ones. They stay on subject, boring / unfunny bits are edited out etc.
My favourite example in this is the No Such Thing As A Fish -podcast from the QI crew.
I didn't know at first it was carefully edited, but then they started releasing the outtake bits as bonus episodes and the curtain was lifted =)
I don't have 2.5 hours to dedicate to a single podcast episode, on a topic that might be quite complex, while having to suffer through jokes and poor pacing.
Then they listen to those rambling podcasts to "keep up to date" about what's happening to whoever they chose to follow.
I had a colleague at work who listened to a YouTube "podcast" that was 3-4 hours per episode, they just had it on a second screed yammering away while they worked. I don't get it.
Then Apple stopped automatically downloading podcast episodes for people who aren't actively listening, and Spotify presumably counts actual plays rather than downloads, and now we know which half is wasted.
When you are what you measure, measuring more accurately isn't always a fun exercise.
Pretty much all the podcasts I regularly listen to are part of a larger brand/media ecosystem so they clearly aren't intended to make money as a standalone. Mostly a mix of guys with day jobs blowing off steam talking to people they find interesting, or media people with full time jobs on radio/tv or in print/etc. Bloomberg for example puts out a lot of interesting ones.
Of course, once that was available, advertisers would next want attribution for who had listened to which ad segments, etc. and it would all be downhill from there.
https://podcasters.apple.com/support/5392-listener-analytics
That’s what makes this article slightly puzzling. The change described in the OP article would not affect Apple’s analytics ( I think). It would only effect download counts for their party analytics.
We hate that here on HN and always disable it.
Do you want Microsoft to snitch on your listening habits? I bet not.
I’d stop using the podcast app if they gave my behavior data out to anyone.
https://podcasters.apple.com/5314-introducing-subscription-a...
If that is what podcast is about, then it's booming in my region(Pakistan).
It is possible that overall podcast listening is still up yoy. It is also possible that even if the top podcasts decline (which the article sorta hints at?) that it may just be because the market is now saturated with thousands of competitors that each take a very small slice.
Mind you I'm not saying, toss away mp3's, but they could offer the low/mid/high bandwidth option, same as youtube.
Even npr’s app would cache several hundred mb of content when you started and eat up bandwidth to the point I had to stop using it. Maybe that’s been fixed but yeesh.
I regularly stream a pirate radio station and AAC 32kbps is pretty damn good.
It was never that big in the first place, apple simply made it clear.
I get the reason for this change in general and the idea behind it, although this still gives inflated numbers for a minimum of 5 episodes.
Granted the odd ball out would be Apple and if they’d support the analytics in their podcast app, but much like Apple’s podcast directory is the defacto directory, there’s an opportunity for a better, OPEN, solution.
EDIT ADD: I’d be surprised if every podcast app doesn’t already collect a robust amount of analytics on listening, they just don’t report it where podcast owners could see easily.
Do not enshittify podcasts.
Not sure we're not already on that path.
Nothing wrong with paying for a product. A common method is a private patreon RSS (Atom) feed. It's still an open standard but the podcast earns money. It's at least a better option than the path Spotify took.
> Many thus feature localized ads.
I'm not against dynamic ads per-say, but it really reminds me of TV with the Ad's being wildly irrelevant to me and often being significantly loader than the actual podcast
Basically the aggregator can grab the main RSS feed and tell the server "I'm not just one person, I'm actually serving this to {subscriber count} people" and the server can use that information if it wants to.
Some porn sites (i.e. PornHub) make info about where people spend the most time watching available in the UI in the form of a small graph over the seek bar at the bottom of the video. Even though the adult entertainment and sex work industry has historically been a pioneer of new tech, I don’t think they’re alone in tracking that stuff.
And I’m not thrilled about any of that. I’d be upset if my podcast app started reporting more info. I don’t really care about the specific privacy implications of knowing which podcasts I listen to, but I do care about the loss of privacy in general, especially because some people might be potentially more affected than me.